Secret Apartment Discovered

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

My childhood home was bizarre. Built along a hillside, it had nine different levels, four large staircases, two or three smaller ones, and a ladder to a finished loft. It didn’t have any truly secret rooms, but all the unused attic space was accessed from the side via doors. Two in the loft, one in the master bedroom, and one in my bedroom.

Inside my attic space which we called my “back room,” was a tiny door that opened to a small crawl space. I probably should have been frightened by it, but there was literally nothing in there. When I visited the house recently, the family we sold it to were still there and let me show my wife around. The woman didn’t know about the tiny second door.

There was also a small cellar, it’s door tucked away in the corner of the living room. A piano or cabinet hid it easily.

Also a fireplace open to two rooms on either side, a built-in vacuum system you could talk to other rooms through… that house had character.

82

More related to the medicine cabinet murder than the main theme of this thread, but, I was once living in a single-story apartment building. I didn’t like the location of the cable TV wire in the living room, and discovered that there was a trap door in my closet that opened to a large crawlspace under the building. I drilled a new hole in the living room floor, crawled down into the crawlspace and moved the wire. Some time later I realized that I could probably have come up through the closet in any of my neighbor’s units. I never investigated to see if other units had crawlspace access too, but I jammed a piece of wood into the closet to make it hard to open the trap door from underneath.

83

That reminds me of the low-rent apartment I lived in in college. It too was a single story “garden apartment” complex. I noticed my unit had a trap door leading up into the attic, but I didn’t realize until later that my unit was the only one with access to the attic. So when my next door neighbor’s heat broke, the maintenance guys had to wake me up so they could get up there to fix it. Although I suppose in a way that was a good thing, as I did later hear a story about someone in a similar building who burglarized his neighbors by going through the attic.

Although now that I think about it, maybe mine wasn’t the only apartment with attic access, maybe it was just the one closest to the broken heater.

84

Wow, this thread is popular and I suspect I know the reason why: secret or hidden rooms / passages in houses have an analogy to our own subconscious. I, for one, often have dreams about hidden rooms in a house, typically one from my childhood. When exploring these places in a dream, I believe I am perhaps visiting places in my mind that have been hidden for a long time. Or so people say.

Also, ever since I was at least 4 or 5 years old, I have been in love with “secret” hideouts for kids. I remember begging my dad to construct (finish out) a hideout in my closet, similar to one I had seen at a friend’s house I had visited, probably for a birthday party. He left (divorced) before he ever attempted this project so I went without.

Many years later, in fact in the house I currently live at, we have small triangular half-finished spaces in the edges of the upstairs, built near the eaves of the roof. Indeed, these are hidden, oddball areas.
These passages sometimes connect adjacent rooms, and are used for storing stuff like Christmas wrapping paper and boxes of old books. Too bad my son and his friends are already teenagers and therefore too physically large to occupy these spaces for fun…if we had lived here a few years earlier no doubt he’d have wanted to have sleepovers in there.

85

I spent my first eleven years in a house which had a shower stall in the unfinished basement. That’s it, no other plumbing fixtures – just a stall and nothing other than a curtain separating it from the rest of the basement.

The place was a split-level ranch built in 1960; I can only assume the shower was so dirty kids could enter via the mud room and head down the concrete stairs to wash off without getting anything else dirty.

ETA: come to think of it, that was the only shower in the entire house. The two full bathrooms on the top floor had tubs, no showers. Main level and garage/mud room level both had half baths.

86

Not a secret room, exactly, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it was way, way too cool to not bring up again.

Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, what with the religious palaver that was going on, hiding priests of the wrong religion became a bit of a deal, and with good reason, and there’s ‘priest holes’ in many an old English building.

The church near my school was a real old one- the oldest parts of it dated back to the 1200s, and there’s layers and layers of history there. Some of the main funders of the later additions were Catholic; there are statues of them inside, which had the heads and feet hacked off during the 1600s, and it seems from records that the church was one defying the orders to stop holding Catholic ceremonies.

We got taken there a lot for history lessons, as you might imagine. I’m a long way from religious, but it’s still a pretty cool place.

Anyway, my school building was also pretty old, and really wasn’t purpose built. When I was about 10, they decided to build a new toilet block. The builders, while digging the foundations for this, dug into an unexpected tunnel. It turned out to go under my school, running from the church to a farmhouse - which was also ancient, and partially fortified- up the hill. It was never confirmed, but it appeared to be a 400 year old secret priest escape route, that came up under a fake gravestone in the churchyard.

I am aware how crazy this sounds, and I never saw the tunnel myself (we were told it was extremely unsafe, largely collapsed, and we were later told by the the vicar he’d the entrance filled up for safety) but I will never forget the face of the builders- they looked like kids who’d fallen into an Enid Blyton adventure.

And yes, multiple kids got yelled at next time we went to the church for jumping on the graves trying to find the fake one.

87

That 1960 split-level had kitchen cabinets with lazy susans in the corners, like this but without the top shelf. Us kids left graffiti on their walls.

88

Interesting! You’ll not be surprised to note that I have the exact same lazy susan thingy in my current home. Two shelves tho; no room for kids.

89

Thank you for this recommendation. I am really enjoying this book.

90

I’m so glad. I see (a younger) Jeremy Irons in the part.

91

There probably was a bathtub there originally, not a shower. A window above the bathtub would be quite nice, I’d think.

But probably not the most energy-efficient place for a window, especially with decades-old building materials and technology.

92

Neat, but how did they get the different owners, or hell, even one of the owners, to agree to this?

93

Beats me, but knocking through walls to adjacent buildings like that is somewhat common in Manhattan. Of course, I’m sure it’s much easier if you own both buildings already.

94

How did they get the fire department to approve? One of the regulated purposes of walls in cities is to prevent fire spread.

95

It all seems unlikely.

96

Why wouldn’t a house built in the late 50’s not have a shower as well as a bathtub like it does now? Also, even if it did only have a tub the moment the bather got up everyone in the world could see them. I don’t think you are grasping how big that stupid window was.

97

A friend in high school grew up in a house that was built during the prohibition. There were many secret compartments and rooms in that house. She wasn’t a close friend, so I never actually visited the house but I heard about it.

98

Ever heard of frosted glass?

99

Probably because there’s a big window in the bathroom and it wouldn’t make sense to put a shower by it?

100

These types of things use steel fire doors for that reason.